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Having a business means that you have to think through risks and consequences that may come in the future; therefore, everything should be planned even before you launch your business. There are things that should be considered while building a business starting from financial management, employees, even to marketing. Many business owners nowadays know one more important part in establishing a business; SEO. Yes, they hire various SEO companies to do SEO services for their business, maybe including you. That being said, even though you have hired an SEO specialist to do their job for you, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get involved with the process. In fact, you should be involved too. Not only can you be well aware of the situation, this can also help make things easier for your SEO specialist if you know some techniques that can boost the progress. One of the techniques is link building. Oftentimes, many business owners join their SEO specialist in building links for their website. However, due to having limited time to do it properly, many people still make mistakes in link building, thinking that Google won’t notice. Be careful, some mistakes are sometimes unforgivable. You may want to avoid some techniques in link building especially it’s 2018 at the moment. What should you avoid, then? Keep reading to find out!

Sending spammy blog commenting

Link building is basically putting our links to other websites in hope to get a link back to our website. Therefore, blog commenting is one of the ways we can do link building. However, many people are still doing it wrong. I don’t know if commenting for some people is a waste of time or they are really lazy to read through the blog articles to deliver relevant comments. Instead, they ended up customising the same comment for different blogs, making it look spammy. The right way to do blog commenting is when you read a little bit of their articles first (not just looking at the title and just go on with commenting), and understand what they are sharing in the articles, and comment on it accordingly and relevant to the topic. If you don’t have time, you can hire another person or one of your employees to help.

Spamming links through your forum profile signature

Joining a forum seems to be harmless, especially when your profile features a backlink as well. You can actually leave a lot of backlinks by frequently replying to forum threads. You might think that frequently replying to forum threads will make your SEO performance better, but the truth is that just like blog commenting, doing too much also has negative effects.

Submitting your content to low-quality content directories

Low-quality content directories may be cheaper in terms of price (and sometimes free) and easier to be approved, but low-quality directories can’t offer you effective results, and after Google pushed out their series of Penguin updates, the real benefits of content directories have faded away. Instead, it is better for you to write guest posts on more reputable websites. Although the editing is quite strict and sometimes you have to pay more, the results are more effective and reliable.

Redirecting domains (that’s so Black Hat)

This not-so-new trick has recently been used by SEO professionals, where there is 301 redirecting specific domains to funnel link juice right into their web proprieties. Just like many other black hat SEO techniques, it can work well as long as you execute it perfectly. However, once Google finds out, your rankings are gone and your entire time spent on building the juice flow will be in vain.

Getting significant results on SEO may take a long time, but it will be worth waiting for, instead of wanting fast results using black-hat SEO techniques that will damage your SEO process. When you are genuinely taking this SEO process seriously, you will do your best in maintaining and improving your business performance. Therefore, when big efforts may take long, better results will pay it off.

If you’re ever feeling masochistic, try to look up someone famous who is younger than you on Wikipedia and marvel at how much they’ve achieved compared to you. I did that when I was reading about the tennis prodigy Alexander ‘Sascha’ Zverev, who at the age of 21 and ranked fifth in the world is the youngest player in the top 10. Even at such a young age, his Wikipedia entry is longer than mine ever would, assuming that I would even have a Wikipedia entry of my own, which is not very likely.

To further cement the point, Sascha’s Wikipedia entry also has a link to a page containing the details of his career so far. If I’d like to, I could actually spend the entire day tracking his entire career from his Wikipedia page, made possible by the generous amount of links Wikipedia has kindly provided. This is what is referred to as internal linking, in which links to pages from the same website are spread throughout a certain page, enticing users to click through those various links to catch up on the whole story, so to speak. For marketers and SEO services, internal linking is an essential process in optimizing a website.

SEO and internal linking

Links, specifically backlinks, are an integral part of SEO. In fact, the first algorithm that Google use to evaluate pages for their search engine, PageRank, named after co-founder Larry Page, uses the number and quality of backlinks as a primary criteria. Now that the ubiquitous search engine has two decades of progress on its back, links are just one of many, yet still important, part of the equation.

By comparison, internal links don’t directly impact how certain websites might rank in a given search engine results page, which is why sometimes, they are overlooked in the whole SEO process. In reality, internal links do have a direct effect on SEO, but not in the same way that backlinks do. Rather, internal links are integral during the process of web crawling and indexing, in which search engines identify and evaluate websites to be included in their search results.

Determining how link values are distributed across your website

Link value is closely related to the issue of information architecture but they’re not completely interchangeable. When search engines crawl and index your website, they look to your website’s sitemap for information on how your site is organized, its topology for a lack of a better word. For the most part, this topology will closely correlate to the link of value of your website pages, the homepage sitting at the top and the various contents at the bottom.

This is partly because in most cases, links to your homepage will be almost always included in every single page of your website. By the same token, contents that are linked only within the category page will carry less link value and therefore ranked less prominently. This idea can be manipulated by having sections for most recent and/or popular contents within your main page to boost the link value of those contents.

Content structure and the relationships between content

By now, you should be aware of the use of ‘tags’ within various sections of the internet. These tags are what web admins use to categorize pages based on the type of contents. Navigate to the ‘Royal Family’ section on the Sydney Morning Herald for example and you’ll be taken to a page featuring a collection of stories from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’ ongoing visit to Australia. These section pages occupy the middle ground between the main page of your website and your main contents.

When search engine crawls through your website, these tags help them understand how pages within your website are related to each other. As with most things in life, few things are ever simply one thing, so a post about the dress the Duchess wore on a particular day would be tagged as both ‘Fashion’ and ‘Royal Family’. In each of the articles within the ‘Royal Family’ section, there would be a link to the section page itself, which acts as a signpost to web crawlers which pages that cover similar subject matter.

These tags could also be used to establish content structure by working hand in hand with the link values described above. Normally, websites operate under a pyramid-esque structure. At the top is the main page of the website itself, linked from every page of the website. Underneath that, we have the section pages, linked from every page of the related section. At the bottom sit the actual contents, linked from the section page and often other related contents but not as much as the section pages.

The recent trend is that websites are no longer using section pages simply as a collection of links, rather we’re now seeing more and more of what I like to call headlining contents or what the internet refers to as cornerstone contents. This type of content serves as a more-focused section page but with the added touch of a narrative. Instead of simply listing articles within that section, cornerstone contents attempt to create a narrative that binds those articles together.

For example, say you’re trying to do a piece on the history of electric car development from its infancy in the early 20th century to the now infamous General Motors EV1 and the burgeoning industry of electric cars in the current climate thanks to Tesla and the Nissan Leaf. Instead of presenting this as one article, you can divide this piece into several articles but with one overarching outline serving as the cornerstone content. As such, when search engines crawl and index your website, this cornerstone will be given more prominence above the other smaller articles.

The phenomenon of Wikipedia wormhole

Other than for the purpose of crawling and indexing, internal linking can also be used to the purpose of making your website more attractive to readers by this thing we call Wikipedia wormhole. For those unaware, Wikipedia wormhole is the phenomenon in which an unsuspecting reader begins his day reading about Nick Kyrgios only to end up on the page for Kosovo War solely through Wikipedia’s internal links.

By using internal links and recommendations on your contents, you can entice your visitors to an extended stay in your website. Always keep in mind that while SEO is for search engines, it’s your actual human visitors that should serve as the ultimate goal and proper use of internal linking works on both counts.

Almost all business owners know that using a website to promote online visibility is compulsory. Using a website allows every business a chance to be found by their target audience who needs their products or services. However, having a website alone is not enough. You have to think about maintaining the website while being creative in the web design as well. Speaking of web design, we may be familiar with a website’s part called homepage. Yes, that’s the first page we would see when visiting a website. If you are a business owner having a website to maintain, you should know that homepage is actually the first-impression page that will determine whether or not your visitors will stay on your website. For that reason, many web designers and content creators try to deliver the best content on that page. With that in mind, what should you include in the content for your website’s homepage? Keep reading this article to find out!

Headline

Your website should tell visitors what your business has to offer. That’s where your headline comes in. With a few words, you have to deliver one of the most important pieces of copy on your website. Make sure your headline is simple and clear. Take an example from Dropbox. Their headline “Securely share, sync, and collaborate” is simple but powerful.

Sub-headline

Sub-headline works as a complement that complements your headline by describing a brief description of what you do or what you offer. Do this effectively by telling what your product or service solves.

Primary calls-to-action

The goal of your homepage is to attract visitors to dive deeper into your website and move them further down the funnel. Include two to three calls-to-action above the fold that can direct people to different stages of the buying cycle, and place them in spots that are easy to find.

Supporting image

In this new era, everything is visual and it is important. People are not interested with boring long text anymore. Therefore, make sure to include visual elements on your homepage to attract more visitors and make them interested in your offer. You can include a big photo or a video. That being said, you have to pay attention to the size, because when a photo or a video is made in too big size, it can hurt your website, as it may take long to load.

That’s the important elements that should be included on your homepage. By applying the right content on your homepage, you can attract more visitors to your site and make them feel “at home” when viewing your homepage. If you need a website with friendly elements and great web design, feel free to contact us and let our awesome team help you.